The following table shows browser usage movements during the past twelve months:

Browser

April 2013

April 2014

change

relative

IE (all)

29.69%

21.41%

-8.28%

-27.90%

IE11

0.00%

8.33%

+8.33%

n/a

IE10

6.19%

3.60%

-2.59%

-41.80%

IE9

13.35%

3.31%

-10.04%

-75.20%

IE8

9.30%

5.64%

-3.66%

-39.40%

IE7

0.59%

0.19%

-0.40%

-67.80%

IE6

0.26%

0.34%

+0.08%

+30.80%

Chrome

39.21%

45.33%

+6.12%

+15.60%

Firefox

20.05%

18.60%

-1.45%

-7.20%

Safari

7.99%

9.77%

+1.78%

+22.30%

Opera

1.00%

1.37%

+0.37%

+37.00%

Others

2.06%

3.52%

+1.46%

+70.90%

The tables show market share estimates for desktop browsers. The ‘change’ column is the absolute increase or decrease in market share. The ‘relative’ column indicates the proportional change, i.e. 24% of IE7 users switched browsers last month. There are several caveats so I recommend you read How Browser Market Share is Calculated.

Following a long period of stability, Chrome jumped 1.6% in a single month. Even that’s not particularly impressive compared to its mobile cousin (see below). Perhaps it’s a statistical blip, but Chrome looks set to smash the 50% barrier during 2014.

Some of Chrome’s gains can be explained by the demise of Windows XP. Microsoft dropped support on April 8 so it’s unsurprising to see IE8 drop almost 1%. IE11 sucked in some of those losses, but Internet Explorer is looking vulnerable and will fall below Firefox in a few months if current trends continue.

Firefox itself fell a little but Mozilla must be hoping that version 29 will be a success. Opinion is divided but the majority of users seem pleased with the first major interface update in three years. Whether it can entice users from Chrome is another matter.

Safari and Opera were mostly unchanged although Opera has grown reasonably well during the past twelve months. That said, a large proportion have refused to migrate from the pre-WebKit/Blink version (12.x).

Worldwide Mobile Browser Statistics, March to April 2014

After a few months of 1% increases, mobile usage slipped a little to 25.02% of all web activity. If your boss/client is dithering about whether they should build a responsive website, that’s still one in four web users!

The top mobile browsing applications:

Mobile Browser

March

April

change

relative

Android

26.44%

25.52%

-0.92%

-3.50%

iPhone

20.88%

21.14%

+0.26%

+1.20%

Chrome

11.95%

15.62%

+3.67%

+30.70%

Opera Mini/Mobile

13.70%

12.26%

-1.44%

-10.50%

UC Browser

11.30%

11.09%

-0.21%

-1.90%

Nokia Browser

5.64%

4.82%

-0.82%

-14.50%

IEMobile

2.20%

2.38%

+0.18%

+8.20%

Blackberry

2.22%

1.81%

-0.41%

-18.50%

Others

5.67%

5.36%

-0.31%

-5.50%

Chrome for mobile jumped another 3.7% in one month. While newer Android phones will explain some of that increase, existing mobile users are also switching to Google’s browser. Unsurprisingly, the stock Android browser dropped but Chrome looks set to overtake Safari on iOS shortly.

Blackberry has now fallen behind the relatively unknown NetFront mobile browser, which has a 1.94% market share. While there are still many devices out there, I suspect the time has come to remove Blackberry from the chart. It’s become largely irrelevant from a web development perspective.

Craig is a freelance UK web consultant who built his first page for IE2.0 in 1995. Since that time he's been advocating standards, accessibility, and best-practice HTML5 techniques. He's written almost 1,000 articles for SitePoint and you can find him @craigbuckler

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Finn Balle-Larsen

Sorry to say, but IE11 sucked in from IE9 and IE10 also. Therefore we are looking at a absolute drop for IE of 1.42%, where we could expect that most of the almost -1.0% escape from IE8 is (most likely) WinXP users staying with WinXP but shifting to another browser like Chrome. That is a whopping 1 out of 6 users!
But the remaining increase for Chrome is most likely also from IE users as “normal” i.e. the more than 0.6% IE descrease and 0.3% from Firefox, month after month.

http://www.facebook.com/revi.bennett Revben Chase Da Kingdom

This shows usage and not users. Ie has far more users than chrome.

Finn Balle-Larsen

The usage statistics show that the users browsing are not using IE. For Windows users that is because they have chosen explicitly NOT to use IE or that they are NOT browsing (or only very little).
So in real life, why does it matter if there are “far more” users of IE if they are not using the browser?

http://jeffmcneill.com/ Jeff McNeill

This kind of “worldwide” data is not very useful, as most sites have a unique profile, depending on their user base. However, trends are huge in terms of the ongoing shift to mobile, and also the decline of Internet Explorer and the rise of Safari, which has little mention here. We remain in a multi-platform, multi-browser world, with Chrome maintaining leadership, decline in Firefox and Internet Explorer, and of course a decline in Windows and rise in iOS/Android. I just looked at some good sized data sets on different client’s site traffic to get a better picture of what it means and what to do.